How do we read and why? Analysing the act through a broad spectrum of media theory, philosophy, literature studies and neuroscience, Grace Harrison considers the idea of language as art form, political tool and “collective force”…

Reading forms an integral part of how many people come to know the world and each other, from newspapers to the novel, from the façades of buildings to Facebook. The Torque ‪Symposium, programmed by Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner, sought to examine how and why we read. With the invited speakers coming from a broad spectrum of media theory, philosophy, literature studies and neuroscience, the focus continually shifted from the impact of technology upon reading — from cultural and neurological perspectives — to the historical context and political implications of access, and the changing ways we as a society engage.

The final sentence on the days hand-out invited ‘audience and speakers to enter into self-reflexive discussions about what reading means to them, how it has impacted upon their lives and how they envision and want to shape its future.’ With such invigorating and challenging contributions from the speakers it was hard not to take up the mantel.

From the varied contributions, I was especially interested in how we might widen literacy, the capacity for self directed learning and autonomous research, by creating access to the wealth of knowledge increasing enclosed; locked into institutions, journals and by copyright legislation.

“The political philosopher Nina Power asserted that to read politically means to “examine both who reads and what””

In the first talk, the political philosopher Nina Power asserted that to read politically means to “examine both who reads and what.” She gave two concrete images of how the state is currently attempting to dismantle reading as a “collective force”: firstly, the de-funding of libraries across the country under the guise of austerity, which, due the difficulties sustaining something on volunteers alone, will likely spell their demise; secondly, the restrictions the current government attempted to impose on prisoners’ access to books for apparent security reasons — which is particularly symbolic if we allow ourselves to see the prison as the most acute manifestation of societal control. “It is a slow war of attrition, the degradation of hope, the extraction of resources and denial of nourishment” (Prison Abolistion, Never Alone).

Power asked the question: what does it mean to read against power and force? To read beyond the thought constraints imposed by disciplines? She recalled histories of autodidactic mining communities who established their own libraries and self educated towards greater social and political participation, beyond what some might like to think as their allocated professions; classes were self-organised outside of working hours to learn about subjects such as astronomy, politics and literature.

Power also illustrated the perennial persistence of reading groups and, notably, the resurgence at various points of those who collectively approach Das Kapital, suggesting that one of the reasons could be seeing Marx’s seminal text as destabilising, crossing between economics, sociology, philosophy and political science. Marxism is at best considered as a family of disciplines, which is historically subject to reinvention. Power’s use of ‘transdisciplinarity’ in reading was as a positive breakdown of hierarchies and specialism, opening up room for people to explore beyond a restricted field, and engage in passion-driven reading.

Power had a consistent political framework to her contribution, and she delivered it with a clarity and directness that had great resonance. It brought to mind George Orwell’s short text, Politics and the English Language (1964), in which he wrote of the importance of making one’s language clear, especially when engaged in political discourse. He advocates for political language to be an instrument for expressing and not for obscuring or preventing thought. He proposes the “scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness…. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.”

“Power articulated with precision how those who have power control language and urged us to reclaim it, among other ways, through reading”

Power articulated with precision how those who have power control language and urged us to reclaim it, among other ways, through reading. She helped us to see the pervasive fear held by the ruling classes in the “dangerous and corrupting” potential of reading; even within bourgeois society and the attempts to prohibit women reading romance novels such as Lady Chatterley’s lover. Spurred on by Power’s words and Orwell’s text:

“One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”(Politics and the English Language, George Orwell (1946))

By contrast, it led me to think about the work of the writer Hélène Cixous, who produces diverse literary work from a similar perspective of reclaiming power through the written word: “(Cixous) envisions a new form of writing — Écriture féminine (feminine writing) — that is outside of and no longer bound by the rules of patriarchal discourse” (Helen Cixous; Live Theory. Pg3). Cixous identifies the political necessity of developing the territories of the excluded and the marginalised. She poses a vital question as to whether we can write a world beyond patriarchy within the framework of the current structure?

However, Cixous’s approach to writing could also be considered as moving away from the logic of Power’s presentation and Orwell’s text, in the making meaning clear. As she attempts to develop an expressive space, a bodily, visceral and affective language emerges in which something not yet conscious is transmitted. A tension present in revolutionary acts, in this case writing, is the difficulty of escaping known forms while still being received and understood.

Professor of Political Aesthetics Esther Leslie made a poetic and fluid contribution to the day which resonated with Cixous’s space of embodied fluidity and felt like a contrasting approach to form and content when compared to Power and Orwell. Beautifully tracing how the materials we use shape the way we think, from Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s writing on the unique relationship to Chinese and Japanese traditional paper (1933), to Walter Benjamin’s observations on the potential changes to expression brought in by the typewriter, and the effects of illuminated signage which populate our urban spaces. Leslie explored the construction of subjectivity through handwriting as well as what may be below writing on the page, a “scriptural unconsciousness” which might be revealed.

“Leslie’s beautiful articulation of the pure experience of immersive reading sat in stark contrast to the discussion later in the day around speed-readers, which allows one to consume written information up to five times faster”

Quoting Benjamin on numerous occasions, she traced an image that appears within his writing of the snowstorm, or the flurry of words. When speaking of the child reader in his essay One-Way Street (c.1920), Benjamin wrote: “the swirling letters like figures and messages in drifting snowflakes… he is covered over and over by the snow of his reading” (pg 463 Walter Benjamin, Selected writing Volume 1). Leslie’s beautiful articulation of the pure experience of immersive reading (which can be seen as an increasingly scarce experience among the pressures of contemporary life) sat in stark contrast to the discussion later in the day around speed-reading software, which allows one to consume written information up to five times faster through ‘silencing subvocalisation’.

Leslie invoked the infinite as she described the snowstorm in Benjamin’s texts, as well as the infinite in the possibilities of books and of reading. She points towards a world that might be, just as the snowflakes of words settle on the lines on the page.

Leslie followed Benjamin’s words out of writing to his assertion of the importance of visual literacy, for political and social participation through his text The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) where he writes: “The illiterates of the future will be the people who know nothing of photography rather than those who are ignorant of the art of writing.” At this point, the link between visual practice and writing is reinforced and the importance of art for comprehension is brought back into the room.

It is here that I’m reminded of Caroline Bergvall’s intensely hypnotic performance at 24 Kitchen Street as part of the Syndrome events programme (also produced by Nathan Jones). Bergvall’s approach enacted precisely the experience of language Leslie was evoking using Benjamin’s snowstorm imagery. For the work entitled Drift, Bergvall had teamed up with Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach and Swiss visual artist and programmer Thomas Köppel. They used live voice, live percussion and 3D text treatments to create a dense, moveable and abstract universe: a drifting, shifting, sounding, language ‘mass’. The performance was invigorating and moving in equal measure, as it was the poetic, spatial components of both visual and linguistic resonance, which were operating on the unconscious.

“Performative utterances can be ‘transformative’ performatives, which create an instant change of personal or environmental status, or ‘promissory’ performatives, which describe the world as it might be in the future”

I’m brought back to the concept of ‘Performative Utterance’, which was introduced by Nina Power earlier in the day, but ran through many of the contributions. As articulated by critical theorist Eve Sedgwick: “performative utterances can be ‘transformative’ performatives, which create an instant change of personal or environmental status, or ‘promissory’ performatives, which describe the world as it might be in the future.” Although this kind of symposium is not unique, one could perceive a form of embodied imagining in which Jones and Skinner open up to the public the process of research in which they are deeply engaged. They themselves seem to be questioning how possible it is for people to really enter into that process, but remain enthused by the multifarious avenues of individual enquiry that may emmerge.

For me, there was a degree of displacement in the experience of the symposium. It was a day of primarily academic talks and detailed analysis, which were organised independent of any educational institution and hosted in a public gallery. It’s possible this created a dis-juncture in the audience’s expectations, or a misplaced reading of performance to the talks. This contributed to the experience of slippage or the transdisiplinarity that was being discussed; this kind of free-form collective learning which is just not as possible within academia. Perhaps we were missing a Bergvall-style enactment of the ideas at play.

“Fragments of overheard conversation, quotations from newspaper articles and web pages, ideas for performances, rough drafts and other notes were repeated many times until emptied of their original signification and given new meaning”

As a form of conclusion to the day, and partly in answer to this criticism, there were a series of performances at Static Gallery. Tim Etchell’s Broadcast/Looping Pieces was formed of a live remixing of pages from his notebook, gathered texts of many different kinds. Fragments of overheard conversation, quotations from newspaper articles and web pages, ideas for performances, rough drafts and other notes were repeated many times until emptied of their original signification and given new meaning. In the performance, Etchell “selects, intercuts and remixes material from these texts which he has stored away over the years, creating a torrent of language that often loops and repeats on individual lines, editing and re-writing on the fly, creating new dialogues and juxtapositions.”

Experiencing the work, it did also feel like an act of deconstruction, an attempt to open up a space to a primary visceral language, through his use of intonation, gesture and breath. The form of the piece spoke directly to Leslie’s earlier observations about Benjamin’s “scraps of note books, in which there is no hierarchy.”

The day itself consisted of others engaged in the act of reading, and we the audience mainly listened, often enraptured in that experience, through the clarity of thought and delivery of Nina Power’s contribution to the poetic lucidity of Esther Leslie. Many of the other talks focused on areas of study which were completely outside of my ability to relay here. However, that didn’t in any way hinder the exhilarating pleasure of letting a stream of new and challenging ideas wash over me, grabbing at fragments and making notes for further research. Benjamin’s image of the snowstorm was strikingly resonant for the experience of the symposium in it entirety.

Grace Harrison

This article has been specially commissioned for The Double Negative by Liverpool John Moores University and Arts Council England. Part of the collaborative #BeACritic campaign — see more here

Grace was at Torque Symposium #2: An Act of Reading, 21 January 2015, 11am-6pm in The Box, FACT Liverpool. This second symposium of the Torque project, curated by Sam Skinner and Nathan Jones in partnership with FACT, evolves Torque’s concern with language, brain and technology into discourse on The Act of Reading. With talks by Katherine Hayles, Garrett Stewart, Esther Leslie, Nina Power, Soenke Zehle and Alex Leff

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